Taylor Swift’s latest album “Midnights” has dropped, and it might be setting a new standard for China’s digital music industry.
Within a day of its release, the 13-track album, priced at 35 yuan, or $4.83, has racked up nearly 200,000 copies on Tencent’s QQ Music, one of the largest music streaming platforms in China. While $4.83 doesn’t seem like much — the album starts at $11.99 on the artist’s own online store — it’s the highest price ever set for digital albums in the market, which could indicate two things: the upstream cost of making albums has risen, or Chinese users are increasingly willing to pay for online music.
China’s digital music industry has taken quite a different route from the Western one. For a long time, music piracy was rampant across online an …
